Past (3 page)

— You don't mind being in this room? Alice said, turning away quickly from catching sight of herself in the age-spotted swing mirror, though she couldn't help her hand going up to adjust her hair.

— I don't mind. Why should I?

— Because you have to come through my room, and that's a nuisance for you. You can't go through Roland's room because of Pilar.

— I don't mind.

Arthur asked whether Harriet would like to take his picture and when she said she'd love to he put on an assured, equivocal smile for her camera. Then Alice, also camera-natural, sat beside him on the bed, arm around him, for another picture. Arthur offered to take one of the sisters together, but they wouldn't hear of it. They both had a horror, not ever acknowledged, of how closely alike they looked, and yet unalike. In family groups they made sure they were always one at either end. Harriet's hair turning white had made the resemblance more startling.

They went ahead with supper although they hadn't heard from Roland: pasta in a tomato sauce with olives and capers, sourdough bread, salad dressed with olive oil and sea salt. Alice had made the table lovely with more flowers and the tarnished heavy silver cutlery which had been their grandparents' wedding present. She'd found a damp-spotted lace tablecloth that smelled of its cupboard. The sash windows on the side of the house were thrown up and the slanting late sunshine rebounded from the mirror above the sideboard; they ate in its dazzle and the whole scene had something commemorative about it. None of them had dining rooms in the rest of their lives or ever used tablecloths, let alone lace ones.

— Just to think, said Fran, — that this might be the last time we come here.

Alice said she hated thinking about it and Fran shouldn't jump the gun, that was what they had to discuss when they were all assembled. The children, searching from face to face to gauge the collective mood, were poignantly good mannered under its influence: Ivy's peaky face was lifted up towards nothing because she was suspended between this real room and another imaginary one. The telephone rang on its stand in the hall while they ate and when Harriet came back from answering it she looked disappointed.

— It was Roland. They're not coming until tomorrow.

— I knew it as soon as the phone rang, Alice said.

— He always manages to do this, Fran exclaimed. — Every time!

— Oh, it's his little power play. He doesn't know he's doing it.

For a moment they were flattened; expectation of the others' coming had buoyed them all up. Their brother and his wife and daughter – Molly was his daughter by his first wife – had seemed all the more glamorous in their absence, and the evening had been climbing towards the high point of their arrival. — Pretty feeble excuse, Harriet said. — If he really has a meeting tomorrow, he surely could have let us know earlier?

— But actually I'm glad, said Alice, recovering, sitting forwards with her elbows on the table, holding up her wineglass to the others so that her bangles fell chinking down her arm. She had put on a vintage bolero with transparent sleeves over her summer dress. — Isn't this special, just the six of us? I feel quite reprieved, that we don't have to meet Roland's new wife tonight. We'll be fresh tomorrow, we'll be ready for her. But just for tonight – we're perfect without them, aren't we?

— I don't care if they never come, said Kasim cheerfully.

— Roland should think about us when he gets married so often, Fran said. — All over again, we have to learn to live with a new wife. We'd got used to Valerie.

— Sort of used to her.

— I wasn't ever used to her, Ivy said. — Her voice was screechy and her head went like a chicken's when she walked.

— Like this, said Arthur, imitating it.

Alice said wasn't it such a relief, now that Valerie was a thing of the past, to be able to come out with the truth at last?

— Don't encourage them, Fran said. — They're bad enough.

After dinner Alice hunted in the sideboard for candles: electric light was too brutal, it would spoil the magic. And when the washing up was done and the beds were made up and the children were quiet upstairs, the adults sat around the table again, with the windows open because the night was so warm. Poetic moths, significant in a thin soup of lesser insects, blundered about the candle flames. Harriet had put on a cardigan and tied a silk scarf round her neck, a concession to sociability; scarves were Alice's thing, but encouragingly she touched her sister's and exclaimed at how pretty it was. Pulling off her apron, Fran dug out chocolates and a bottle of Armagnac from among the supermarket boxes. Alice stole one of Kasim's cigarettes so she could blow smoke at the insects, then stole another one.

Kasim was quite drunk, warming himself expansively in the tender attention of the three women concentrated on him, each of them old enough to be his mother. They drew out his responsiveness as girls of his own age didn't yet know how: girls thought he was cold and clever. He sprawled back in his chair and stretched his long legs under the table, aware of exerting and stretching his intelligence, and of the sisters' alertness to him – unguarded, because they had outgrown any narrow self-possession. The girls he knew were always performing something, or if they let go of their guard then there seemed nothing behind it. His cleverness in relation to these older women operated like a sexual power in itself – even if the power reached out to no particular end. He tipped the Armagnac luxuriantly round in his glass and slopped it onto his shirt, dropping ash from his cigarette onto the carpet.

He addressed himself to Fran, who was a maths teacher in a comprehensive school, and might have liked him least if he hadn't worked on her. She seemed more definite and perhaps more limited than her sisters. Kasim had once had a crush on his maths teacher, and Fran's freckled plump hands roused a pleasurable memory of equations written out neatly on a whiteboard. Showing off, he talked about optimisation theory and the chain rule in calculus – the amount
x
of some good demanded depends on price
p,
which depends on the weather, measured by the parameter
w,
and so on. Actually maths was dull, moving in its inexorable circles. But he enjoyed frightening them with his solutions to the banking crisis: we ought to have let the banks fail, he explained severely, and let the insurance companies who bought the collateralised debt obligations fail, and let the people who borrowed too much to buy their homes, lose their homes. We need less regulation not more – global finance operates as a set of interlocking cartels and a free market is our only hope of breaking them up.

Alice was horrified, but also proudly vindicated by Kasim's display of himself. Of course he knew what the sisters' opinions were even before they voiced them – their dusty old hopeful leftism, their old-fashioned aspiration for the state to be the instrument of social justice.

— The trouble with capitalism, Alice said, — is that it's always predicated on growth. But we can't go on just making more and more things, and using up more of the earth's resources. We have to cut carbon emissions, to begin with.

— Are you serious? Is there anybody who seriously still thinks there's time for that? Do you imagine that Chinese heavy industry can run on sunshine?

— We have to live differently. We have to learn to do without things.

— Tell that to the Chinese.

Fran said she didn't want to think about global warming, it was too depressing.

— D'you know, Kas, Alice said, — Harriet was a real revolutionary when she was younger! The real thing! You'd be amazed. She was arrested over and over. She went to prison for her beliefs.

— You make it sound as if she was planting bombs or something, Fran said.

— Were you planting bombs? he asked. — More fun than economics.

He was used to his father's friends' nostalgic bragging about their radical pasts.

— Of course I wasn't planting bombs. Harriet looked down uneasily into her coffee, chiming her spoon against her cup. — I wasn't really a revolutionary. Don't take any notice of Alice, she doesn't mean half of what she says. She just talks to be entertaining.

— You used to go on all the protests! You lay down in the road in front of cruise missiles! You filmed police tactics in the miners' strike! You hated being middle class, from our sort of family. And do you know was she does now? She works advising asylum seekers. It's such hopeless work. She's so good. She listens all day to stories of rape and torture.

Tetchily Harriet interrupted her. — Don't try to make a drama out of it, Alice. You turn it into something that it isn't.

— I'm so selfish, Alice persisted. — I only live for myself.

Kasim said it was the only way, live for yourself and make plenty of money.

— At least I've never made any money. I'm not that bad.

— I wish I was that bad, said Fran. — I wish I had money.

Lying awake upstairs, Ivy could hear their voices and laughter: she identified in a frisson of loneliness with a solitary owl calling over the fields outside. Turning her invisible hands this way and that in front of her face in the dark, it was impossible to believe that she ended at the limits of her skin and couldn't surpass it. At last, curling on her side with her knees up, she descended the ceremonial staircase of her sleep, shedding a heavy cloak on the steps behind her, unpinning the dark rivers of her hair, which fell in her dream all the way down her back to the floor.

KASIM ATE BREAKFAST
the next morning in a deckchair in the garden outside the French windows, scowling, retreating inside himself, without even a newspaper or his iPad to hide behind. He had shed the previous evening, choosing to remember nothing about it. The second gloriously fine day in a row already struck him as monotonous – what were you supposed to
do
with fine weather? Ivy and Arthur, who'd been up for hours, watched from a respectful distance where they sat cross-legged on the lawn; when he turned his back on them deliberately, they moved to a new vantage point. Alice and Fran – revealed to him, disturbing, softer, older, in their dressing gowns and without make-up – supplied him solicitously with coffee and orange juice and toast.

He contemplated escape, imagined himself on a train back to London, and asked if anyone was driving into town. But then he saw in Alice's face how she would be crushed if he left; because of his father, Kasim felt exposed whenever Alice showed her vulnerability. Anyway, London wasn't what he wanted, he was already on the run from there. On second thoughts, he said, he would rather stay put. He pretended he had work to do, though actually he hadn't brought any books. Reprieved, with a rich smile, Alice put her cool hand on his forehead as if he was sick.

— You take it easy, she said. — Enjoy yourself.

He tried not to show how much he wanted her to take her hand away. After breakfast he made a little pilgrimage, up through the field with the cows in it to the gate at the top, to check his phone. Ivy and Arthur followed faithfully after him.

— Now, wait here, he said sternly, stopping some little way before the gate, gesturing out an invisible line along the ground. — No coming any closer. This is private, right?

Impressed, they kept back religiously behind his line, standing poised on the very brink of the forbidden, shuffling their feet to be as close as they could get, both making pantomime efforts not to topple forwards, Ivy tugging Arthur fiercely back into his place. Kasim climbed to the top of the gate as Ivy instructed. He didn't know why he bothered. Among his messages there was one from his mother, which he didn't read, and one from the girl; he decided before opening this that if she used any form of text-abbreviation, which he despised, then he wouldn't respond.

— Where r u Kas? she wrote.

With a sigh he switched the phone off and discovered that from this elevation he could see the sea in the distance, looking more like a flat wash of silver light than like water; and beyond the silver wash, a blue line of hills. He had had no idea that they had arrived so close to this other edge of the country – how small it was! He said to himself sometimes that he was more at home in the Punjab, although he hadn't been there since he was fifteen, when his grandfather died.

Roland and his seraglio – as Alice called them, though not to his face – arrived at Kington at lunchtime. He drove an old Jaguar XJ6 with all the original beige leather upholstery. His new wife Pilar, Argentinian and a lawyer, was beside him in the passenger seat; she had passed the journey reading through papers, replacing one file every so often in her briefcase and pulling out another. Sixteen-year-old Molly had been stretched along the back seat, either asleep or playing with her iPhone, and every so often she had asked how far it was now, just as she had done when she was six.

They pulled up on the cobbles beside the outhouses. All the noise and forward thrust of travel faded and receded, the engine clicked secretively as it cooled, and when he stood up out of the car Roland experienced the scene for a moment as archetypally English, as if he saw it through Pilar's foreign eyes: the simple white house with its arched window, the surging pillar-like trunks of the great beech trees with their canopies of sombre bronze-green, the dancing silver birch, the old church sunk in its graveyard, the white doves in the stone dovecote belonging to a barn conversion opposite. But it might all seem poky and parochial to Pilar, who had spent her childhood summers on a ranch on the Argentinian pampas, where her uncle raised cattle and bred polo ponies. Her uncle, whom she loved much better than her own father, had been up to his neck in junta politics.

Molly and Pilar yawned and stretched, Pilar fished for her shoes. She had slipped out of her high heels in the car and tucked her feet underneath her on the seat while she was reading, as she always did; her feet were long-boned and slender like her hands. Roland began unpacking their luggage.

— It's a nice example of a small English rectory, he explained to her. — Built about 1820.

She was smiling, willing to like whatever he liked. — It's very pretty.

— I'm fond of it because our mother grew up here. Molly's been coming here all through her childhood. But of course the upkeep's expensive, it needs a lot of work.

— You can't ever sell Kington, Dad, Molly said flatly. — You're not allowed to. It always has to be here to come back to.

— We'll have to see.

Roland had worried that Pilar and Molly wouldn't get on. His own relationship with his only child was unproblematic and doting, but he had thought Pilar might be exasperated by Molly's silences and awkwardness. They seemed to be all right, though; since they first met a few days ago – Molly lived mostly with her mother, his first wife – Pilar had taken her to have her hair cut and her eyebrows threaded, and had bought her new clothes. Molly had been gratefully absorbed in these initiations. Probably Molly's mother wouldn't approve – she was stern on the subject of the commodification of beauty. It was interesting to Roland that a woman's appearance, so seemingly effortless, might in fact entail all this earnest expertise and hard work. Pilar's elegance was accomplished out of sight, a daily miracle. She had never asked for his approval.

Alice and Fran and the children spilled out noisily from the side door of the house; they crowded around Pilar and kissed her and then kissed Molly. — At last! At last you're all here. Welcome! Don't unpack now, leave it, come and eat. We've put out lunch on a table on the terrace. Isn't the weather wonderful? There are going to be three weeks like this, I know there are. Harriet's out bird-watching of course. And Jeff isn't coming! He's done his usual thing, booking himself in to play, claiming he'd forgotten all about the holiday. Are you all right in those shoes, Pilar? Divine shoes! Take care on the cobbles though.

Alice linked her arm into her brother's, walking round into the garden. — I can't believe you in a white suit, Roly. Do you remember, when you were twenty you despised me and Fran because we cared about clothes?

— I've never despised anyone.

— You did, you did! You despised us. Now look at you! It's such a good look. Like one of those academics on television, wandering around a ruined monastery or something. Crumpled and sexy and wise.

Roland was short and compact and calm with blinking brown eyes, the lids very curved; his grizzled, tightly curled hair was cut close to his well-shaped head and his mouth was unexpectedly soft, loose-lipped. His smiles when they came transformed him. He didn't mind his sister teasing him but he didn't respond in kind, he never had: he hadn't been very playful even when he was a child and supposed to play. He had always preferred knowing and explaining things.

Pulling Pilar along, Ivy and Arthur pressed her to admire the lunch table, where they had decorated each place with leaves and sprigs of unripe blackberries. — It's very nice, she said of everything, not quite satisfying them. A bowl on the table was piled high with fruit, another was full of baby tomatoes and sliced cucumber; butter and cheese were laid out on leaves and a loaf was put ready with its knife, yet they sensed that Pilar was not overwhelmed. They let go her hands. She said she didn't want to sit down to lunch yet, she was cramped from sitting for so long in the car.

— There's no hurry, said Alice. — Stretch your legs. Breathe the air.

Ivy groaned, she was starving, she couldn't wait or she would die of hunger. Ignoring her, Fran opened a bottle of something fizzy to toast the new arrivals.

— You should see this place in the spring, Pilar, said Alice regretfully, — when the flowers are so perfect.

— Everything here is left just as our grandparents had it, Roland said, gesturing into the shadowy drawing room. — Our grandpees, as we called them. He was afraid Pilar was seeing the faded beige brocade on the sofa and chairs and the damp stains on the wallpaper, which had peeled away from the wall in one corner. There weren't even many real antiques in the house, most of the furniture was wartime utility, which had come with the house when their grandparents moved in.

She was sympathetic. — These old houses are so expensive to maintain.

— We don't maintain it, Alice cheerfully said. She sat on the terrace steps with her bright face uplifted, hands clasped around her knee, keen to charm her new sister-in-law. — We love it just how it is. Do you know, Roly, that I forgot my keys? When we arrived I could only peer into it from the outside, through the windows. Then it seemed an enchanted place: as if we'd only seen it in a mirror and wouldn't ever be able to get inside it. Now I keep feeling as if I passed through the mirror and I'm living in there, on the other side.

— Our grandfather was minister here for forty years, Roland said. — And he was a poet too: a good one I think. Alice will tell you whether he's any good. Alice is the poet in the family now.

— I'm not a real poet, Alice apologised. — Not like Grandfather. Do you like poetry?

Pilar said she didn't have time to read any and Alice sympathised. — There's never any time, is there? What happens to it?

Molly already had her guitar out of its case. She bent over it, hair falling to hide her face as she bent down to the strings – she might have been showing off except that her playing was so hesitant, made with such minimal movements of her fingers that it barely stirred the air: a little repeated pattern of notes close together, in a minor key. Her fingers hardly seemed to press the frets. Arthur stood watching, compelled by the tiny music.

— I can't believe we're drinking again, said Alice. — We only seemed to stop five minutes ago. I ought to be more hungover than I am. Kasim's in a bad way this morning. He was here at breakfast but he retreated to his room again and hasn't been seen since. He said he was working but we think he's just gone back to bed.

Then she had to explain all over again who Kasim was. Roland tensed visibly, warily. Brought up in a household of women, he found them easier, more stimulating, and resented the idea of an unknown adult male on his territory, let alone Dani's son, who was still in bed in the afternoon. Dani had been a disaster for Alice, Roland thought.

Coming out of his bedroom, still sleepy, rubbing his eyes bad-temperedly, Kasim met Molly just as she arrived at the top of the stairs with her rucksack. Alice and Fran had mentioned Molly, but he'd presumed she would just be another little girl, a nuisance. Both of them visibly quaked at catching this unexpected sight of each other; not with attraction immediately but with shock at this encounter with one of their own kind – young – in this place where they had both been resigned to being singular, and even relieved by it. The encounter added interest to the whole situation, most definitely, but also pressure. They passed in silence, Kasim on his way to the bathroom and Molly to her bedroom. He carried away her image – delicate little cat's impertinent muzzle, little springy high breasts – imprinted on his mind's eye and digested it afterwards while taking a piss, not too noisily, in case she was listening. Running the cold tap, splashing water on his face, he stared into the mirror above the sink and saw himself differently because she'd seen him; he knew that now, alone in her room, she was digesting his image too.

On her way home from birdwatching Harriet crossed a tussocky field, a narrow wedge shape between two stretches of woodland, rising steeply to where it was closed in by more woods at the top. After the woods with their equivocal shade, the strong sunlight was startling when the path opened onto this gap; a red kite ambled in the sky above, small birds scuffled in the undergrowth, too hot to sing, and a pigeon broke out from the trees with a wooden clatter of wing beats. A stream ran down the field, bisecting it, conversing urgently with itself, its cleft bitten disproportionately deep into the stony ground and marked against the field's rough grass by the tangle of brambles that grew luxuriantly all along it, profuse as fur, still showing a few late white flowers limp like damp tissue, and heavy with berries too sour and green to pick yet, humming with flies.

Harriet followed the sound of the stream's boiling and deep chuckle up the field to a place where it tumbled over a stone and fell to foam in a dark pool below, all out of the sunlight, hidden under its thick fringe of growth. Crouching, she reached out her hand to break the water's fall; it bore away from the stone lip in a perfect glassy curve, vividly cold. She wanted to taste it but thought that wasn't sensible – who knew what pesticides they used on these fields? On her solitary walks she was ambushed occasionally by this fear of accidents: what if she fell, and no one knew where she was? So she touched her wet hand to her forehead instead, and the water dried against her skin as she walked towards home, through the woods down to the road and past the restored mill which sold handmade paper to London artists, then onto the disused road which climbed again, along the side of the hill to Kington at the top.

Roland's Jaguar, when she got there, was pulled up between her car and Fran's, and luggage was left on the cobbles – so much good-looking luggage, expensive suitcases and briefcases and laptops, and a lovely straw basket, lined with cotton print, a billowing scarf tied round the leather handles. Harriet stood hesitating – she could hear excited voices, mostly Alice's, coming from the back garden. Entering into that high-pitched sociability would be like breaking through a skin, all eyes would turn on her and see how she was hot and dishevelled from her walk. Harriet dreaded the effort that would have to be made, getting to know Roland's new wife: a stranger was a fearful and impregnable unknown country. Even this luggage intimidated her, with its aura of life lived according to a high, intolerant code that she would never master.